Electric Wurms: Musik, Die Schwer Zu Twerk

Flaming Lips’ futuresonic spin-off.

With their mothership temporarily docked, chief Lips Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd have decided to get their freak on as Electric Würms.

Joined by various members of trippy Nashville band Linear Downfall, the pair dish up some fantastically squidgy space rock on an album whose title translates as ‘Music That’s Hard To Twerk To’. And so it proves. It’s hard to imagine Miley Cyrus giving it plenty to the knotty psych-prog of Deformed In The Future, with its nagging guitar figure, percussive rolls and starry twinkle of keyboards. Much less the throbbing interstellar dub of Futuristic Hallucination. Like much of The Lips’ own output, this is very much an adventure in sound, experimental without disappearing up its own black hole. That said, the minimal use of vocals (Drozd appears to be driving the project) means that Electric Würms are different enough to warrant their own name. There are two curious covers here: a heavy pummel through Miles Davis’ Sivad, renamed Transform, and a blissful, free-floating version of Yes’s 1971 classic, Heart Of The Sunrise. Whether this is a one-off remains to be seen, but Musik… suggests these Würms have legs. RH